Wonders never cease. But these kinds of conversions are less rare than the media/culture would make you think:

He raises interesting points. I will try to update this post later with my response to some of them if I can, but for now, enjoy, and see what you think.

Evolution is the prime error – or extremely dubious theory – upon which so much modern sexular paganism and its rejection of Christianity hangs. Darwin removed purpose as the basis of existence, and turned existence into a meaningless crap shoot. Secularists lap that up for some reason, even if classical philosophers can shoot it so full of holes it’s laughable. As another video I posted showed, evolution is one of the prime dogmas of the new sexular pagan religion. They can’t prove it, they can’t even explain it well, but upon it so much else hangs.

And if you disagree, you’re a damnable heretic. Burn!

UPDATE: I wanted to add a bit more to this discussion that I didn’t have time to address yesterday. Intelligent Design as a theory both is and isn’t completely satisfactory. I say that because there is a huge disparity in what adherents to intelligent design propose. Some try to fit intelligent design into a literal interpretation of Genesis chapters I-X, while others try to meld it into a way to explain the origin of species while accepting a 16 billion year old universe. And that latter part is where the trouble comes in. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do know that trying to reconcile evolutionary theory with the Faith gave birth to the modernist heresy, and has led many millions from the orthodox Faith into outright apostasy or, at the very least, extremely disordered beliefs and practices.

At present, I am so highly dubious of evolution and all allied theories on the origin of the universe that I basically dismiss them, totally. I accept Genesis I-X as a literal description of how life began on earth. But I am a little leery of some of the explanations of the primarily protestant Intelligent Design. I really like the work of the Kolbe Center best of all in this field.

I friend and reader of this blog, Terry Carroll (I don’t think he’ll mind if I use his full name), gave my family a remarkable gift of a rather large number of very good books recently. I have dived into a couple of them already, and want to share an excerpt from the preface of one of them with you today, Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. BTW, the publisher of this book, St. Augustine’s Press, seems to carry a good number of rather philosophically oriented but highly orthodox books from some very heavy hitters: Aquinas, Suarez, etc . You might add them to your list of safe and reputable publishers.

The below may not contain any great revelations, I don’t know, but I think it deftly describes the rapidly growing new pagan religion of atheism, which is something of a cult of science and leftist thinking turned into a religion of creeds, dogmas, heretics, devils (us!), and all the rest. All of which only demonstrates the fact that man is an endemically religious creation, and absent Christianity will create all manner of disordered, even evil pagan religions to replace the God so many men desperately want to kill. Begin quote (my emphasis and comments)

….The successes of the movement to recognize “same-sex” marriage have been nothing if not sudden. Just over a decade ago (this book was written in 2008)the very idea would have been laughed off as crackpot or extreme; now it is those who oppose it who are frequently labeled crackpots and extremists. But equally sudden has been the rise of ostentatious unbelief as as the de rigueur position of the smart set. Mainstream progressives and non-conformists of earlier generations would have found it necessary to profess belief in at least a “social gospel” and to hide their doubts about the metaphysical claims of religion behind a haze of pseudo-theological psychobabble. Yet atheist chic is now, out of the blue as it were, the stuff of best-sellers, celebrity endorsements, and suburban reading groups. It is as if the urbane cocktail hour secularist liberalism of the twentieth century has, by way of the slow but sure inebriation produced by an unbroken series of social and judicial triumphs, now become in the twenty-first century fall down sloppy drunk and lost all inhibition, by turns blaspheming, whoring, and otherwise offending against all sane and decent sensibilities as the mood strikes it. [What a great sentence. If the rest of the book is like this, I’m really going to enjoy reading it. But the metamorphosis of atheism from a sort of slinking and even embarrassing phenomenon of the elite into the out-n-proud, boastful religion of today is due to the increasing impact of the modernist errors outlined by Pope St. Pius X, who predicted exactly this result should modernism be accepted en masse. It is also the inevitable result of mass acceptance of endarkenment anti-Catholic beliefs, which had the direct goal of destroying the political and cultural influence of the Church and setting up a neo-Roman pagan, anti-Church state and culture. Welcome to the future that was designed for you 300 years ago. Modernism is only one of the later, and most finally destructive, aspects of endarkenment beliefs.]

The confluence of these developments is no accident, though not for the reasons liberal secularists suppose. To their minds (or what is left of them), sexual libertinism and contempt for religion, as public, mass phenomena (rather than as the private eccentricities of a decadent elite, which of course have always been with us) constitute the final victory of reason, twin fruits of the modern scientific worldview whose full consequences are only now becoming widely perceived over four centuries after its birth.[I would argue again, this understanding of science as the fruit of only a pagan, “rational” mindset, is completely false, and another poison fruit of the endarkenment philosphes. There have been many, many great scientists and thinkers of all stripes who were very pious souls at the same time. Most of these were Catholic, some were in the sects, but they all had a deep faith. It was the philosphes who started the propaganda campaign that identified science with their militant anti-Catholic paganism, and smeared Christians as benighted, ignorant idiots who opposed science. Darwin latched onto that and sent it much further down the road. The distinction that has been drawn between science and faith is a false one, and even more, science has today become a religion of its own, or a large part of the new sexularist pagan “atheist” religion. Thus we have millions of people who treat as abject heretics those – even great scientists! – who doubt anthropocentric global warming, even though not even a handful of those millions are scientifically literate themselves, and most of them couldn’t even be bothered to begin to understand the “science” behind the global warming jihad.] But in reality they are (to paraphrase Aquinas paraphrasing Aristotle) two very great errors that have followed gradually but inevitably, not upon any actual finding of modern science, but upon what might at first glance seem at most a relatively “small error” of a philosophical nature committed by the founders of modern science and modern philosophy. [I haven’t gotten to that revelation, yet, but I suspect it has to do with what I discussed above, the deliberate attempt to turn faith into an irrational exercise of emotion and not one grounded in reason. In reality, it is the “rationalists” who are profoundly emotional and closed to reasoned debate]

….it is a certain kind of moral and religious traditionalist, and not the secular liberal, who is the true upholder of reason….

…..But the most important thing to know about the belief that God exists is not that most citizens happen (for now, anyway) to share it, that it tends to uphold public morality, and so forth. The most important thing to know about it is that it is true, and demonstrably so. [And Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and many other have proven this so, from first principles] Similarly, the most important thing to know about “same-sex marriage” is not that it has been lawlessly imposed by certain courts even though a majority of citizens happen (again, for now anyway) to oppose it. [And here, 6 years later, most now support it, at least tacitly. That is a preference cascade of unbelievable quickness and consequences]The most important thing to know about it is that the very idea is a metaphysical absurdity and a moral abomination, and (again) demonstrably so. It is no more up to the courts or “the people” to “define” marriage than it is up to them to “define” whether the Pythagorean Theorem is true of right triangles, or whether water has the chemical structure H2O. In each case, what is at issue is a matter of objective fact that it is the business of reason to discover rather than democratic procedure to stipulate.

———–End Quote————

And yet, the entire structure and philosophical order the informs the modern secular libertine state is one that admits no core Truth, no unbending Laws of God, but only the constantly varying will of the people as informed (or deformed) by interests with the ability to sway vast swaths of the population. Thus, we really don’t have democracy, but an oligarchy pretending to be a democracy. But that’s a whole different issue.

I think the point is this, and I’ve tried to make it several different ways at different times over the past year or two: where we are at today, as a culture, became more or less inevitable as soon as the endarkenment theories of Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and all the rest were accepted en masse. They are views that when acted upon lead invariably to anti-religious, and especially anti-Catholic, bias, as history shows. Now, you can either pursue these novel endarkenment ideas in a very radical manner, and wind up with the French Revolution, or you can pursue them in a much more conservative manner, and have an American Revolution. But both tend over time not to liberty for individual souls, but with the steady growth of the state into an all-encompassing leviathan that must and will crush all competitors in its path, especially religion, because only religion can compete for men’s allegiance in a way similar to what the leviathan demands.

Again, the leviathan can come about quickly and violently, as in a communist revolution, or slowly and steathily, as in creeping socialism of greater and greater scope around the world, but with the direction this country has taken for the last century, it appears the leviathan will come about eventually in every liberal democratic state no matter what, because the totalitarian pagan state was the ideal upon which the endarkenment philosophy was founded. And wherever the state expands, the Church contracts, because you cannot serve both God and Mammon.

We are simply witnessing what happened in Canada and most all of Europe decades ago now in this country. And look at the state of the Church in those places.

Sorry to be a downer, but I think this thing has to break before it can be fixed. So maybe this immigration isn’t a bad thing, if it hastens that eventual result.

That’s one of many angles examined by Michael Voris in the Vortex episode below. There are several explosive revelations in this video, one is a further confirmation that the Obama Administration has been preparing this “unexpected crisis” of ostensible youth immigration for a year or more, the second is that the bishops are deeply involved and have happily received millions of dollars in advance from the administration in order to help cope with this “crisis,” and virtually the entire crisis has already been gamed out in think tanks previously. That is to say, there is a goal in mind, a plan in execution to reach that goal, and we are well on the way to seeing it achieved. The ultimate prize is to use Hispanic immigration to flip Texas from a conservative to a liberal state, or from the democrats to the Repubniks:

The revelations regarding the dioceses of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Galveston-Houston are potentially explosive. I would like to see more on that.

Some may balk and say that of course the bishops accept money from the federal government all the time for one purpose or another, and that in a “crisis” (I use quotes, because I do not believe this is a naturally occurring phenomenon, but is being forced by the Obamas) Catholic’s charitable impulses would always compel the Church to act. That may certainly be the case, but it is also immaterial. I say it is immaterial because the effect – transformation of the body politic of the United States -will occur despite the motivations, whether selfish, political, humanitarian, or a mix of all three.

I will say there is one weakness in the hypothesis, which is the assumption that most of these illegal immigrants who cross the Rio Grande (or, as they call it, the Rio Bravo del Norte) will remain in Texas. At present they are being shipped all over the country – or, at least, that’s what we’re told. So I don’t know if a sufficient concentration will really develop to affect the politics of this state, but I’m certain that overall the dems do plan to use completely unconstrained immigration to vastly improve their electoral prospects. And to the degree that the USCCB or individual bishops do anything to improve those prospects, no matter the motivation, I agree they are playing a very dangerous game, because democrat electoral dominance would lead to devastating consequences for the Church, from permanently enshrining abortion in law to assaults against even Her most private prerogatives.

But from Obama’s standpoint viz a viz the Church, it’s almost the perfect gambit. It would be very difficult, and counter to all their impulses, for the bishops to say “no way, we’re not helping you with your ginned up fake immigration crisis” (again, fake, because there has not been some great change in conditions in Central America, someone is encouraging – very forcefully – these people to come here, and I suspect we’ll find out just which federal agency that is over the coming months). They would be disposed to help for many reasons, some virtuous, others not so much. But it would not only take great wherewithal to say no to the President, but to go counter to so many of their own predispositions and inclinations.

But in doing so, they may be helping to bring about even more favorable conditions for outright persecution along with the irrevocable moral collapse of this nation.

I wonder if this stuff gets hotly debated in the bishop’s private e-mail channels?